


the world is safe

by trsh



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Angst, F/F, Fire Emblem: Awakening Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-07 16:06:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17963744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trsh/pseuds/trsh
Summary: Two teenagers pretended to be adults to save the world. Now, one of them is gone, and the other might as well be.Please look at the notes before reading





	the world is safe

**Author's Note:**

> **A Warning:** This piece very heavily takes from my real-life experiences, because I don't know how to talk about my trauma like a normal person. Among other things, there will be mentions of self-harm (physical and mental), suicide, sexual harassment, children being treated like adults to uncomfortable degrees, and the self-destructive act of moving forward with your legs metaphorically snapped in half.
> 
> There may be other things, things that are much harder to explain why it hurts you so much, and things where you may never fully understand the reasons they cause so much discomfort. I do not know how to tag these other things, so I'm hoping these two paragraphs will suffice in getting my point across.
> 
> This was designed to be viewed with custom CSS styling on, but it should work fine if you have it turned off.

_The world is safe._

This was your last living thought, the sole thing giving you any sort of warmth in your demise. Every other thought was of fear; the people who looked up to you screaming behind you, as you simply walked off into the nothingness, knowing that you've caused harm to them by doing so.

The girl you cared about most was choking through tears trying not to scream louder than the others. She had been so strong, stronger than you ever could have been in such a situation, and she knew exactly the lengths you'd go to keep the world you loved so much safe, but no amount of time allowed for a human life would have prepared her for the reality of her entire world still crashing apart, simply internally instead of externally.

You can still hear the ringing of the sobs. It plagues your mind every time you try to stop thinking for even a second.

She's probably traumatized because of you. It's possible she even thinks that you used her, and thrown her away for the sake of changing destiny. She was already mistrustful of you to begin with–and given your bold-faced lies you'd say for the sake of keeping secrets to your strategy, it was always justified–but what's stopping her from thinking your very love was a part of that, too?

She must hate you now. Just absolutely could not stand even hearing your name for a second, wanting nothing to do with you ever again. But that's okay, because everything is safe now.

The world is finally safe. That's what matters, right?

* * *

In the immediate aftermath of the final battle, Lucina was only barely able to form enough consciousness to say a few simple words about Robin. So many emotions cycled so quickly, from the panic when Robin had disappeared, to the relief when she came back, to the happiness when she felled Grima, then to the sudden horror when Lucina had realized what it meant for Robin's lineage to disappear. It was hard to think, hard to even muster the energy to move, much less speak full sentences, but she had always been good at doing things even when it felt like she never could have.

She had reasons to keep going, after all; there was a world out there to save, and someone in the world worth living with once it was all over.

It wasn't until she returned to Ylisstol and laid down on her soft, comfortable bed, where she was finally allowed to think within a scope beyond the immediate spacial awareness needed to move, that she realized she had no more reasons that mattered.

For weeks, she seemed to have disappeared entirely. Rumours of suicide would go from the royalty to the barracks to the public, eventually enveloping an entire city thought to have been at peace to suddenly be scared that it was all too much for their own safety.

Chrom had been trying to talk to her since. He's been able to confirm that she isn't dead, which is nice, but he highly doubts that he can just go up to the crowd like _hey my daughter of this royal family that has already suffered so much loss is in fact alive and not dead, don't worry about it_ and have them believe it.

He needs her to come out and address them personally. He doesn't know if that's ever going to be possible, but he can at least try.

Chrom knocks on her door.

"Lucina?"

There's a slight pause. Chrom was always worried about it at first, but he's learned that it just means she's groggy, and the response always comes eventually.

"I'm not dead." Sure enough, her voice comes out after an eternity, as gravelled and destroyed as it was the last time he checked.

"I'm very much aware, yes."

"You better not be planning on making me go anywhere."

"I don't plan on pressuring you to." Chrom's spent most of the day planning out what he should be saying, lest he come off as someone more demanding. "I just want to talk, alright?"

There's silence again, this one feeling far more painful than the one before it. Chrom is almost ready to leave, but right as he takes his first step out, he hears the door unlock.

"...Well?"

"R-right." Chrom opens up, to find himself in exactly the kind of room one might expect someone who hasn't left in weeks to live in. An unmade bed sits on the opposite side, and a pile of blankets that he can only presume contains his daughter slithers back on top of it, before the hood of the blanketed mass is messily pulled off.

To say that Lucina looks like an absolute wreck would be putting it lightly; if there weren't dozens of dirty bowls sitting in the corner of the room, one would have thought that she hadn't eaten in weeks, with how pale and destroyed she looks.

"How have you been holding up?"

"Do you seriously need an answer?"

"I mean, uh." Chrom realized how asinine that question sounded the moment it left his lips, but his worries were just putting him through the motions at this point. "That's pretty silly to ask, isn't it."

Chrom's used to hearing her sighs, seeing how he's always come off as less of the faultless hero she grew up idolizing, but the sigh she ends up making in response is alien to him. Defeatist, almost, less one of frustration in trying and more of sadness in giving up.

He wants to go through the questions he'd ask anyone in need– _What's wrong? Do you need anything? Should I get a healer if you're ill?_ –but there's no use in it, here. Even if she needed anything, she'd never ask, that's simply not how she operates.

Besides, it's not like he doesn't know exactly what's wrong.

"Look, are you actually going to say anything, or–"

"This is all about Robin, right?"

Lucina looks like she's about to say something, but her mouth snaps shut, her jaw tightening up hard enough to crack.

There's more silence. He's not used to it at all, being the one who usually breaks it in tense moments, but that's only because he always had a good answer to the elephant in the room, and there is none here.

The only two people most likely to have the answer are the only two in this room, and neither of them can utter a word.

"Look, I'm really sorry if that brought up too much."

"No, you didn't." Her jaw tries its damnest to stop tensing itself to death, and it succeeds for long enough to where words can come out. "I-it's something I need to confront."

"Confront?" Chrom almost wants to breathe a sigh of relief knowing he didn't accidentally shut her up for good, but he doesn't want to kill the focus on this. "You say that like it's your fault."

"Because..." She stares off into a distance that isn't quite there, not quite dissociative but something close, as if she's trying to say something but it hurts to find the words. "How much did you know about her?"

"About as much as anyone." Chrom should know more, he'd think, given he's the very first thing she even saw in her memory. "Selfless to a fault, incredibly mature, yet always caring about everyone, and clever enough to find ways out of the roughest paths every time she tried. Seemed fearless, almost."

"That's about what I thought you'd say."

"Am I wrong?"

Her gaze blurs out.

"Yeah. Yeah, you are."

* * *

The first time you had ever met Lucina, she already had a death stare made just for you. You didn't really understand why, since she had only heard of you in that moment she revealed herself as the daughter of Chrom, but it felt almost as if she had a close eye on you the entire time you were alive.

Did she think you were doing something to Chrom? Was this just a thing people do to anyone close to their parents? You tried to calm her nerves on the matter, but her gaze didn't budge for even a moment. It took weeks of anxieties to consider it, wondering if you were simply that bad in her future that one foolish mistake too many broke the entire world around you.

You kept thinking about that part, over and over again, because you always over-think how you could be doing better. You were still the lead tactician in her future, which means you were the one who had to have failed in order to bring that future, right? Was this all your fault? But your other comrades would tell you it couldn't be your fault, and they're the ones who know all the things you don't.

You weren't a very mature person. You likely didn't even pass seventeen years old on a physical level, your memories only went up to two years before meeting her, and even if you could quickly catch onto everything, you still knew very little, yet you were still expected from an entire nation's army to have the mental capacity of a forty-year-old grizzled veteran.

What's stranger is how much it felt as if they'd almost try their best, against all odds, to agree with you. You'd come up with plans only seen as smart because everyone else was too busy fearing their lives to do anything better, and that became the thing people loved you for. You once set all but one of your boats on fire to throw yourself into your enemies, before jumping off to the last one and floating away from the carnage, and despite intentionally destroying so much expensive transportation, people were congratulating you, like it was an amazing feat.

You remember the night after you did that. There was a feast. Grown men twice your age were congratulating you one moment, and then complimenting your looks the moment the booze was brought out. You left early, you sat down in front of the campfire, and when you thought you were alone and you started curling up, the first thing you heard from a tent nearby was her going _what the fuck is wrong with you._

For the first time, you spoke with her directly without anyone else, a genuine conversation. Lucina was right–it technically worked, but not without a lot of losses, and you couldn't stand that. You can't just do that and not expect people to die, but all the adults in the room kept saying that was okay, that you just need to ignore that part, and it took the only other self-aware teenager in your army to make you acknowledge that it absolutely wasn't. People died. It doesn't matter how uncomfortable it is to face that, it's the honest truth. You can't just ignore that.

You'd start to talk about the future, eventually, and suddenly all those thoughts that could never leave your head about how terrible of a job you might be doing spilled out, one by one, every worry of killing your friends and ending it all and not ever knowing why, just that it eventually would, and when you couldn't even stop to breathe in air without sobbing some more, just wanting an actual shoulder to cry on for once in your life, she let you cry on hers.

She was supposed to be judging you, you thought, judging the responsibilities pushed onto you while so young, but when you realized the sheer scale of all the terrible things placed onto her, the entire fate of the future in the hands of someone so young, it clicked that there was never anger or frustration, just empathy.

She never saw the responsibilities. She saw right through them, and with that, she saw a terrified child that nobody else acknowledged.

* * *

In the six months after the final battle, Lucina had managed to leave her room more than once a week. It wasn't because of Chrom, as much as he really wished he could have gotten her back on her feet earlier, but she's started doing any small chores around the castle that she feels would help.

The worries of suicide had waned, finally. Rumors about her and Robin took its place, something not really helped by her vague utterances of _because she wouldn't want me being like this_ whenever anyone wondered what suddenly caused her to change her mind about living a hermit's life, but Lucina never seemed to mind them.

Chrom's learned a lot about Robin, since that conversation he had. When she was scared, her first response was to try and play with her hair, passing it off as elegant when she swept it to the side when she was merely stimulating herself out of a panic attack. When she saw tenseness in others, she'd try to make up a joke plan, wanting to lighten the mood, but then everyone would just work with it and she'd be too anxious to explain she was kidding. When she was serious, she had thousands of plans laid out, hundreds per battle taking hours each to work out, and the moment Lucina was even slightly critical of one of them, she'd just tear it out and try again, no matter how much she'd be told not to.

She'd get testy over what felt like the smallest of words, having an endless knowledge over the sometimes-horrifying origins of simple insults like _imbecile_ or _idiot_. Lucina always found it to be a confusing thing to spend every waking minute getting anxious over compared to anything else, but this was before Lucina went into her room one morning and found her mumbling only the absolute worst of them at herself in her sleep.

She'd go to every party, despite Lucina never getting an answer as to why. Everyone thought she was mature and lively for her age. She'd get a drunkard hitting on her, and she'd just laugh it off in that way women too highly and powerful for mere peasants would as everyone laughed with her. The moment Lucina would do so much as even touch her after the fact, she'd fall into her out of fear, more scared of those men than death itself, knowing that all it'd take is one man trying to step through the façade for everything to be over for her.

She tried to make a list of every soldier who fell because of her, who was slain because of a mistake she'd tell herself she made. She would try, and one book would fill, followed by two, then three, five, ten, and at some point Lucina would just find her in her quarters a broken mess at the break of dawn, dozens of books holding nothing but names of dead men. She'd burn them, afraid of acknowledging them anymore, then she'd get afraid of how she burned them, by which point it would happen all over again.

Sometimes she'd hear the name Emmeryn, and then... something would happen. Chrom isn't certain to what she did, as Lucina would immediately tense up just trying to describe it, muttering something about blood and burn marks, among other things too quiet for him to hear before breaking into silence. As much as he already knew Robin didn't take the death well, he's perhaps a tad too scared of the implications to dig into any more details than that.

The Robin that Chrom knew was an amazing, brave, selfless being; the Robin that Lucina knew was only that by technicality, with unhealthy coping mechanisms and self-harm filling in all the blanks, and the part which held over her the hardest was the fear that she'd been enabling it all this time.

Chrom is in her room again, trying to comfort her. He's not very certain if it helps or not, but the last thing he'd want to do is not try.

"I'm thinking about it again." Lucina's room has gotten far cleaner than it was before, at least. She has a complete bed, though instead of a blanket disguise, she has now decided to hide between her own knees.

"It?" Chrom opens his arms up, and she groggily falls into them.

"The incident." She's trying as best as she can not to stress herself, but one look at her hands tensing back from clawing into herself shows how how hard that can be. "With the sword and the dragon, and..."

"Ah." Chrom's gotten used to her vagueness on some subjects, so he can pick up on what she means. "You don't have to tell me what happened then, you know. I heard everything."

"You hadn't heard the year before that. Do you remember what she said?"

"It was over as soon as it began, not much to remember." Chrom has second-guessed himself more often than not about Robin in recent months, that much he'll openly admit, but the nature of this memory made it clearly vivid. "You conceded quickly, remember?"

"That's not the point." 

Chrom looks at her in confusion. "Then what was?"

* * *

After your worst fears were realized and a man forced you to do his bidding, learning that you were just another controllable pawn with no free will, seeing Lucina again was one of your only comforts you could have had left. She asked if you could go somewhere private, and you were hoping that maybe if you both talked things out, all of this would make sense in your head again.

You walked out to a cliff, and she started talking about her father and how he was the most courageous man anyone would have ever met. You were almost expecting to be able to give her some closure to that, in the hopes that you could make something better for him and everything would be okay.

You wanted that so much, the possibility of making it out alive and being able to finally grow up with her, the way she's always wanted you and her to, being able to live the life the world wanted to tear away from her. You tried to get close to hug her, and before you could even think another moment there was a blade inches from your throat.

That wasn't even the scariest part. The scary part was that when she said she needed to kill you, or else you'd kill Chrom and the world would end, you agreed without even a conscious consideration of it.

You deserved to die.

She kept blinking at you, that same way she did when she first saw you after the fight with all the boats, and you kept looking at her with worry. She told you to stop doing that, and you did, because you thought you were making it hurt more for her and you didn't want that. She kept telling you to stay still, and you were trying so hard and in hindsight that probably just made it worse, and she kept stalling for time, which you didn't understand, and at some point you realized she wouldn't have anyone to talk to anymore if you died and that scared you.

You told her you were scared, because she's the only one who would listen and that's always what you did when you were scared and she was in front of you, and before you knew it, you were held to each other on your knees, with her tears coating your chest.

You didn't know what to do. You still don't really know if you had a better answer with the information you had on hand. You were the devil herself–even before then, and especially after.

Why should you be trusted?

* * *

In the year after the final battle, it almost seemed like Lucina was settling herself into a comfort zone of sorts. She had been seen leaving the castle from time to time, and she's even managed to try training herself once more, the real kind that's built upon not just doing it herself in a closed-off room, but showing others the correct form.

Chrom knows at least some of it is her own stubborn pride, but he's still at least a bit proud that she's managed to pull herself up, in the way she has. He still doesn't believe the wounds have healed, and given the promises she made to Robin, perhaps they never will, but it's a sign that it's possible.

Robin was always someone who seemed to answer a bit too quickly whenever anyone asked if she'd die for a cause, but he never fully realized how bad it was before. In his mind, it was the sign of a truly selfless individual, willing to risk themselves for the safety of millions, but in her mind it was the only thing she could do to redeem herself. The end goal remains the same, but change the point of view, and suddenly the noble hero becomes something far more of a tragedy.

This isn't Lucina's fault. She keeps telling herself it is, but the way Chrom sees it, if she's at fault, then so is everyone else in the world. The entire world's continued existence relied on what she did, and thus the entire world held her to a standard she couldn't keep up with without her mind collapsing in on itself.

Chrom spends a lot of time thinking about this. There was a possibility of her returning, as Naga had foretold, and Tiki had even corroborated such a possibility when she had visited a few months prior. He's had people conduct searches, asking academics the world over, and even the most staunch of dark mages have never seen such a thing happen with their own eyes, but there's at least the glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, it will really happen.

Currently, there's a guard trying to explain a conflict between a soldier of his and a drunkard that had occurred not too long ago. He's only half-listening at first, in favour of trying to piece together that woman he met in a field all those years ago, but just before he had a thought of where Robin might be, he hears a familiar scream down the hall, sending him chasing after it.

"Let me go!"

Lucina is trying to pull herself away from the guards, three trying to keep her still at once. Chrom tries to shoo them away, but they're all so focused on her that he has to loudly command them before they budge. He gestures them towards the nearest general, so they can be scolded, and Lucina looks at him with fear in her eyes.

"Don't you dare stop me."

"From what?"

Without another word, she runs off, and Chrom takes after her.

* * *

The world is safe.

That's good. This should be good. You should like this being what it is. You did this, and you should be proud of yourself. People will live happy for millennia beyond your mere lifespan otherwise.

You did something terrible to it, and then you stopped yourself, and now you're dead and everything is okay. You're dead now, and that means you can't hurt anyone anymore.

You should be happy.

You should be happy!

So why is it starting to hurt? 

## ..............

You're probably being selfish. Of course it's okay you died. Even if it made all the people you care about sad, why would that matter in the face of so many more saved from your sacrifice?

What is the screaming voice of the only man you've ever trusted next to that? What is a flurry of cries from everyone who cared for you to that? What is any soul you've touched compared to the billions you'll never meet, who were saved from what you've done?

## ...R..b..n...

What is the reality that the girl you fell in love with, the only one you could ever possibly imagine a future with where you'd wake up every morning with her, and she was warm and safe and happy, could now likely despise every core of you, if it meant the future was safe?

You made things safe now. You can deal with that, can't you?

_I'm an adult now, right?_

## ...Pl...as..

No.

No no no no nononononono no you aren't. What are you trying to tell yourself? Don't you remember a single fucking thing she told you about this?

You don't know how to be an adult. You never did, you knew how to end lives and cause harm and kill people and you knew how to do that efficiently and that's all you could do because that's all you were born to do. That doesn't fucking count.

You don't know anything, you worthless waste of space.

## ...Co.e...Ba.k.....

What you did wasn't an act of heroics, that was the baseline. You did the absolute minimum you needed to do to be a decent person. What, you think you couldn't do wrong? Then why was it possible that you could turn into the most destructive, evil force the world had ever seen?

And now you want to just turn it all back and put the world at risk because you don't know how to handle your feelings like a normal human being would.

You remember what you did to Chrom. You stabbed him. You almost killed him, the only reason you didn't was from your own weakness. Would you want that to happen to her, too? Is that what you want out of all of this?

You stupid fucking idiot. Stupid, stupid, stupid stupid stupid–

## ...Robin...

You're hearing her cry again.

You deserve to hear this. You hurt her, from the moment she was born into a world you would destroy, to when you kept doing it again and again and again after she came back to fix it, and yet you had the absolute fucking nerve, the audacity to fall in love with her as if you would ever do anything other than hurt her more.

Useless. You're useless. At least you did something meaningful for the world by offing yourself for good.

## ...Robin...Please...

Wait.

No, this isn't the crying you usually hear.

This is something else.

## Come back, Robin... Please...

When you hear the one that lives in your head, it was ringing in an unknown distance, never from any one direction, repeated into your head into infinity.

But this one isn't that. It's coming from somewhere. You can hear it clearly, and it's saying something.

## Robin, please, I'm begging you.

_Oh no._

## I miss you.

Oh no no no no no you aren't hearing what you think you're hearing.

## I don't want to be without you anymore.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

_You were supposed to be happy without me._

## Everything hurts without you...

 _I was hurting you._

## I don't know how long I can manage...

_I was hurting you! I did so many terrible things to you!_

## I don't think I can live without you.

_It was supposed to hurt less if I was gone! You were supposed to be happy!_

## Please, Robin.

_You're supposed to be doing better because you didn't have to be burdened by me anymore! I'm not hurting you anymore!_

_This was supposed to be better for you!_

## I'm begging you.

_This was... This was supposed to..._

## Please come back.

_I..._

## Please.

You need to get back.

How? You're dead, people don't just come back from the dead. How do you even know this is her voice? How would you possibly manage to be in a situation where you'd hear something like–

Hold on.

You're hearing her voice to come back?

In this empty, black void where you can potentially move towards her voice?

You've been here before, haven't you? Were you simply locked away in the same place that Grima placed you once before? Surely there wouldn't be so much grandeur put on this if all you had to do was follow the voice exactly the same way you did before, that's too obvious, surely, it wouldn't be that simple–

But maybe it is just that simple. You remember what you did before, so maybe you should try out a basic plan for a fucking change.

Follow the voice.

Faster. You can't let this get away now, she's hurting because of you. Do something.

* * *

In the year after the final battle, and not too many hours more, the future queen of Ylisstol was in hiding–not to run from an enemy who'd kill, but to find the only girl in the world that gave her a reason to live. She didn't know how she could, but she at least knew where; Tiki had told her as much, that if she were to have spawned from one place, she'd likely be there again.

To be in the outskirts of Southtown and wait for her return was her last hope. All of her attempts at being strong weren't her getting over it, it was her praying, against all common sense, that somehow Robin could come back. It's been one year, to the very day, and she doesn't want the possibility otherwise to set in.

Naga said she could live. Naga said that, and Naga is not a being who says things lightly. Robin's out there, she just needs a hope to hold onto, and Lucina doesn't care any more how much it hurts her, she'll hope as much as she damn well can.

Chrom has been looking at her this whole time in worry. As strange as it must look to the guards holding the area, his daughter has a point; destiny had only buckled to let them live because of the bonds Robin had shared with the people she cared for. Why couldn't it work now?

Frederick's trying to strike a conversation with Chrom again.

"Milord, if I may–"

"The answer is no, and we're staying."

"Y-you can't seriously believe this, can you?"

"Have any of the other things you and I have seen Robin do the past three years been believable by mere human eyes, Frederick?"

"And what happens if it's all false?" Frederick is trying not to lose his composure. "Would you rather your daughter be seen as a laughingstock to the army!?"

"Try to stop her, and she'll slice your hand off for holding her back." Chrom already knows what he's decided on. "She'd rather be a mockery then someone who doesn't care enough for the one person she loves most."

Frederick leaves, frustrated as he was every other time in the past six hours he asked. Chrom knows it's unreasonable. He's very well aware that none of this could possibly make sense, but when it came to Robin, nothing ever had.

Perhaps he's holding out a ridiculous hope, too. But perhaps it's not at all. Perhaps this is truly how she comes back, the girl he thought was a simple hero but was really something far more complicated. If he could ever meet the real Robin, the one his daughter had found underneath that tough shell he saw all that time, perhaps he could even have a conversation with her, too.

* * *

She hasn't stopped crying for hours. You think hours is correct, at least, but quite frankly you don't get to have an authority on how time or space or anything works right now. You don't even know how long you've been in here, likely far longer than any sane, normal human being could withstand.

That doesn't matter, though.

What matters is that you're getting closer, and that she's getting louder, and that you wished you could have gotten here faster than you did–but you finally see something.

A light, bright as ever, in front of you.

You saw this before, on that dragon, but you haven't seen light in such a long time that it's almost blinding. 

You can hear her screams for help, emanating from within it, like it's begging for you to try and reach out to it.

You touch it for a moment–and you suddenly grow tired

a feeling unfamiliar since being in this dark space

and you quickly

lose

consciousness

only to find yourself somewhere familiar.

A blue sky, simple and beautiful, a small batch of clouds covering the brightness. A field, open grass that someone has let grown for quite some time–but not too tall to cover you. In the distance, a small town that's the very first thing you ever recalled, bustling with people looking on. You're almost waiting for a small blonde girl to ask her brother what to do, the same thing you saw the first time you awoke here, but instead the only other person close by is her.

She almost doesn't even notice you, at first, her eyes too blurred from all the crying. She looks at you and hesitates to wipe away the tears, fearing you'll disappear from her if she tries, but when she finally manages to, and you're still there in front of her, she spends the last of her conscious energy leaping into your arms.

"You're..." She's already spent so much tears for you, but she never seems to run out. "You're alive."

"Yeah." It hurts for you to talk. You haven't had a reason to for so long. "Apparently, I am."

Her hands claw as hard as they can into your back, like she's worried you'll just float away again the moment she lets go. You start to do the same, because suddenly the thing you ached and wanted for so long is a lot scarier when she's not there with you to hold onto.

You can hear cheering, at some point. A man near the town called your name, and a few more joined in, and suddenly you're hearing people shouting and yelling in happiness as if you've just kickstarted a festival by merely existing. You see Chrom among them, smiling softly, and it all makes so much more sense. Of course he'd bring the entire cavalry with him for this moment.

It's all a bit of a big ordeal for you, but that's okay. She's still holding you, tight as can be. Nobody can take her away anymore, not the future, not the devil, not even yourself.

"How?" She's trying her best not to choke herself in the tears she has. "How are you alive?"

"Well." Your voice is still hoarse, but it's slowly getting more clear. "I was somewhere dark. I thought I was supposed to be there forever to wallow, but then..."

"But then?"

"But then I heard you." It sounds strange, once you say it out loud. "You were crying because of me?"

She nods silently, and wraps her arms around your head tight.

"I can't stand to hear you like that. I never could."

There's a silence, as comforting as every silent moment you've ever had with her ever could be. Even when your future was dark, even when it felt like you were both seconds away from tearing each other into pieces, it always felt as if the silence was the most comforting part, like in this world where you always need an answer to everything, being able to just say nothing was the easiest thing you could possibly imagine.

Then you hear some giggling, still cracked between sobs.

"Wait." She's trying to stop crying, pushing you off for just a split moment. "So, let me get this straight–you were dead, right?"

"Something similar enough, yes."

"And you came back because you got scared of hurting me."

You're kind of embarrassed now, and she's trying not to laugh too hard at seeing the look on your face.

"That is what happened."

"Gods." She's tearing up again, but with the biggest smile you might have ever seen her make, bright as can be, as she clings right back to you. "That's really like you to do that, isn't it."


End file.
